"M"
Chapter Three
Hannah felt the hairs on her arms stand up and shudder in a wave of goosebumps, a cold tremor snaking down her spine like a trickle of water. Casting aside her decorum, she got up from her chair and rushed through the house in the direction of Margaret's shriek, an uproar that sounded ominously like a cry for help. She was not as sprightly as her youthful namesake, so she could not dart about with the same alacrity, or indeed, agility, but she moved as fast as her ageing legs would carry her, trying and often failing not to trip over her silken skirts.
The servants had all heard the commotion and were peering out from the various rooms they were in as they attended to their numerous duties, their heads poking out like moles, this image proving particularly accurate when it came to the scullery maids who had splotches of dusky soot sullying their cheeks. In normal circumstances, Hannah would have felt degraded to have affected such a ruckus, and she would have promptly ordered that they all return to work at once or face dismissal, but at this precise moment, she was too panicked to think of anything else other than the cause of Margaret's scream.
Making her way along the lengthy corridor that housed the family's chambers, Hannah found herself tersely wishing that her son's was not located right at the end, the passageway seeming endlessly long, the destination of his door feeling like a horizon that was impossible to reach. When Hannah finally entered John's rooms, it was difficult for her to discern what on earth was going on. Margaret was standing on the near side of the bed, hovering over it and blocking her view, one hand clasped to her stomach and the other over her mouth, her petite body shaking like a leaf caught in a merciless breeze upon the Darkshire Dales.
Hannah was beyond baffled. Honestly, this was the sort of nonsense she expected from Fanny, not a sensible girl like Margaret who was always so composed, a shrewd head sitting atop her shoulders, as opposed to one stuffed full of nothing more than airy cotton fluff.
Taking hold of her senses, Hannah took a deep breath through her mouth and blew it out through her nostrils, holding on to her diaphragm as she felt the calming air flow in and out of her, reinstating her lucidity and restoring her mind to its full working order and rational self.
'Come now, Margaret,' Hannah sighed with an attempt at motherly tolerance, an unconvincing sickly sound coming out instead, 'what is the meaning of this? What is going ─'
But for the umpteenth time that day, the mistress of the house, or that is, the former mistress was interrupted, something she was not used to, nor did she like it. Still, on this occasion, she had good reason for being silenced. Coming to a dramatic halt beside the bed, Hannah stared down in abject horror at the sight before her, the most terrifying vision a parent can ever behold, the very thing they pray they will never have to see.
There, on the bed, lay her son, still dressed in his nightshirt, as motionless as a corpse.
At first, John had been still, as if asleep, and she had thought nothing of it, other than a perplexed surprise as to why he had slept so very long past his usual hour, rendering him conspicuously late for work, a phenomenon that had never occurred before in all his working years. Then, a mere second later, there had been a violent jerking motion, and as quick as a blink, John had twitched, although that is not substantial enough a word to describe the singular way in which he moved, the dictionary, with all its many thousands of entries, still lacking a single word to adequately describe his inexplicable movement. Lurched, jolted, convulsed, perhaps one of these would do, but not quite. Either way, it had been so fast and so fierce that one could be excused for thinking they had imagined it, the speed of his tremor too sudden and swift to be supposed humanly possible. He seemed to leap into the air, his large and heavy limbs rising off the bed with him, and then he turned to face his mother as his head lolled around lazily, but God help her, Hannah could have sworn that her boy would not have known that she was there, nor who she was.
'John?' she whispered at first, her characteristically forceful voice eerily timid. But there was no reply. 'John?!' she repeated again, more urgently, a note of panic constricting her throat as she reached forwards to shake his shoulder and rouse him.
John's eyes remained closed, or that is, they flickered open and shut at a disconcerting rate, the whites of his eyes revealing themselves with a haunting fluttering that was unnatural, as if he were flitting between sleep and alertness, between life and dea ─
No! Enough of that! We will not say it. It is too soon, far too soon, to give way to such melancholy thoughts. We must keep our heads if we wish to reach our happy ending, these things being unconfirmed until the final chapter is determined, the final page concluded, all our dreams a precarious hope until that final line is penned, and the ink is dry.
Reaching out an apprehensive hand to feel his temple, Hannah gulped. His forehead was drenched in a pool of cold sweat, yet at the same time, it blistered with an unbearable heat. Tracing her hand down his side, she was aghast to discover that the rest of him was the same, his body soaked by a clammy moisture that covered him like embalming fluid. She was about to speak, but again, he moved.
Lifting his hands and clenching his fists, John thrashed them at his side violently as if he were thumping an assailant, his head lashing around from left to right so rapidly that it was a miracle his neck did not snap.
'M,' he mumbled, nearly choking on the guttural syllable, it being clear that he struggled to spit it out, his lungs congested with a putrid fluid that suffocated him from within.
'John?' his mother called for the third time, trying to reach him in the fog of his delirium. 'John, what is the matter? Can you hear me?'
But all that came back was a slurred yet still distinct: 'M.'
Whirling round like a hurricane to catch out the maids who had all congregated by the door, each one either horrified or thrilled by the disturbing spectacle they witnessed, Hannah glowered at them viciously, sending them flapping in all manner of directions like a flock of warblers with their black dresses and white aprons, their noses made appropriately long by their readiness to poke them into the Thornton's sorry state of affairs. However, just as the last two were about to make their escape, they knocked into one another and were forced to pause and tend to their aching heads with wincing moans. In doing so, they involuntarily enlisted themselves in the unfolding fiasco as Hannah instructed one of them to fetch a doctor and the other a bowl of cool water, a cloth, and her smelling salts.
'What is wrong with him?' Margaret asked when they were at last left alone, and Hannah did not miss the sincere worry in her voice as the wife leant over her husband to get a better look at him, her face whitening as she took in the unmistakable severity of his condition.
'He has a fever,' Hannah replied, rolling up her sleeves and ripping off the buttons on her cuff as she did so, not minding in the least if she ruined her dress. 'And a bad one at that, I reckon.'
The mother bent over to lift her son's head and groaned at the heft of it. Heads were heavy, she knew, but his weighed more than a ton of bricks, no doubt made heavier by the quantity of knowledge he carried inside, not to mention the burden of stress and strife that the poor boy had been compelled to accept without complaint all these years.
As she began to rearrange his pillows to try and make him more comfortable, it was clear that John could sense somebody moving beside him, his hands reaching out to grab at them, his nails clawing frantically at the air and scratching her arm.
'Mmm…M…M-M,' he kept repeating with a desperate rasp, his mouth parcelling and then puffing as he tried to speak, his lips bleeding from a dryness that cracked the soft skin thereabouts.
Hannah was growing increasingly concerned, the earnest unrest in his face more unsettling to her than anything else. She was accustomed to being reliable in a crisis, but even she could see that John's condition was grim, and so she was not ashamed to admit that it put the fear of God in her.
'What are you saying, John?' she questioned, her mouth close to his ear to try and help him hear. 'What M? Mother? Mill? Milton? Or is it medicine? Do you want a tonic? Tell me!'
'Oh!' Margaret sniffed, backing away, her head shaking from side to side slowly. 'Lord forgive me, it is all my fault!' she near enough sobbed.
The elder Mrs Thornton stilled as she stared back at Margaret, her eyes narrowed threateningly. 'What?'
Margaret was obliged to drop her eyes to the floor as she trembled with contrition. She could not bring herself to look her mother-in-law in the face, all her inherent bravery slipping away. She was consumed by a dreadful sense of terror at what Hannah would say when she told her the truth, but Lord help her, it would be nothing compared to the agonising guilt she already felt.
'Oh, Hannah, it is my fault,' she confessed with a remorseful whisper. 'It is my fault he is so ill. You see…I knew.'
Hannah's eyes widened and then sharpened in quick succession, an unnerving glint of green malice flashing behind the film of her iris. 'You knew?' she hissed. 'What do you mean: You knew?'
Sighing a forlorn sigh, Margaret dragged a hand over her face and rubbed at her nose which was beginning to run. 'I've heard him, in here, moving about,' she explained with a sniffling pant. 'He was doing it last night. But I did not understand what was going on. I came in, but he was still. I thought he was asleep, and I had been mistaken. But it was the fever, it must have been, I see that now.'
There was an interval of strangling silence while Hannah took this in, her features ominously tranquil. Then, all of a sudden, it was like thunder cracking through the sky as she unleashed her anger upon the ashamed girl who stood before her defenceless in her woeful distress.
'You silly, silly girl!' she shouted, and Margaret flinched, her tearful eyes as doleful as a puppy who has just been struck. 'Do you mean to say that he has been ill all this time, and you did nothing?' she accused.
Margaret shook her head in dissent. 'I did not realise!' she said in her defence. 'If I'd known, I would have helped him. You know I would have!' she insisted with a bleat.
The young woman knew that her husband's mother thought poorly of her. Hannah had never tried to hide the fact that she thought the woman that her son deemed to be a Helstone rose was nothing more than a thorn in his side, a selfish and supercilious weed that she had failed to prune before the haughty beauty had dug her grubby roots into him. Hannah had not held back on voicing her scrutiny when Margaret had been Miss Hale, and nor did she now that she was Mrs Thornton, but she was deeply dismayed to think that her mother-in-law thought her so callous, so careless, as to dismiss John's life like that.
Hannah snorted. 'Well, thanks to you, John is now gravely ill. He will need to be tended to around the clock and with diligent care to ensure that he…that he…,' but Hannah could not finish, she could not bring herself to say the words and seal her son's fate.
Swallowing thickly, Hannah threw out her hand and waved Margaret away like an undesirable vagrant. 'You should go. You are not needed here.'
She briefly glanced at the door which separated the spouse's bedrooms and grumbled to recall that it was most likely locked, the only key being on the side that was Margaret's room, meaning that the girl could not just slip away into the night and vanish from her livid sight. Hannah had watched from afar as her son had stood by the door on the night before his wedding, constantly opening and closing this partition and taking the key in and out of the lock, unsure and undecided about what was the right thing to do, even if he already knew what he wanted in his heart of hearts. There were, in fact, two keys, but she knew that John had decided that there should only be one made available and that his wife should have it, thus giving Margaret the chance to decide how married she wished to be, leaving his door, his life, entirely open to her, while she alone had the sole choice as to how intimately her husband would be allowed to know her.
This time, Margaret let out an affronted gasp to be dismissed in this way, and stepping out of the shadows, she rolled back her shoulders and stood tall and straight like a soldier reporting for duty.
'I will help,' she said solemnly and without any fear. 'I want to help.'
Hannah's head whipped around, and she scowled at Margaret, her expression uncannily like that of John's when he was most incensed.
The lady chortled. 'You have done enough!' she ridiculed. 'Your help is not required, nor is it wanted,' she informed Margaret reproachfully, just as a maid was hurrying into the room with a large basin of water and an assortment of rags. She was about to hand it to Hannah, who had her hands held out in anticipation to accept her charge, but she did not get the chance, because before the exchange could take place, Margaret had seized it.
Cradling the bowl tight to her chest, Margaret glared at Hannah and elevated her chin into the air, almost as if to demonstrate her majesty and remind her mother-in-law who was queen here, of whose kingdom this was.
'I said: I will help!' she repeated through gritted teeth, clutching the bowl possessively.
Setting it down on a nightstand, Margaret calmly sat down on the edge of the bed, taking up her rightful place by John's side. After soaking a cloth in refreshingly lukewarm water and then wringing it, she pressed it against his forehead and began to dab gently as she massaged his brow. All at once, he sensed the coolness and his restlessness subsided. Margaret smiled softly to hear the sigh of reprieve that left John's throat as his head intuitively moved to follow her touch, his skin crying out in relief to find his scorching temperature abating.
'I am not leaving his side,' she pledged, and even although she was speaking to Hannah, she never took her eyes away from him in their faithful vigil, as if she were a wife making a sacred vow to her husband. 'I will stay here, nursing him until he is well again,' Margaret foretold because he would get well again, she would see to it, she would make it her purpose, her promise from her to him.
Without any hesitation, Margaret took one of John's hands in hers and squeezed it tenderly, her small fingers stretching and wrapping around his larger ones as best they could, marvelling at the size and strength of the object that rested in her care. With her smooth skin caressing his rough dermis, she laid his hand just below her collarbone as she continued to tend to him with her free hand, the steady and steadfast beat of her devoted heart soothing him better than any man-made medicine could ever hope to.
Sniffing sentimentally, Margaret gazed down at her husband. He looked strangely different. No longer harsh, no longer huge, but wonderfully human. He was just a man. Powerless against illness. Helpless to evade the malady that was life. His features were not so severe now but were soft in their vulnerability, a soulfulness, a sweetness, a sensitivity artfully carved into the immortal lines of his face, one that had witnessed so much heartache over the years, some of which Margaret was sorry to realise she had inflicted.
As Margaret looked at him, really looked at him, she had never thought John so handsome, this man who had sacrificed himself to save her in her darkest hour, not once, but twice, a man who deserved to find peace, and it was in that moment that an epiphany washed over her, and she understood that she could give it to him. She was the cause of his sorrow, she knew she was, and so she would nurse him back to health, all so that she could give John what he longed for.
Margaret would tell him that she would go, she would leave him, and so he could claim his life back, free of her, free to forget that he had ever met her, this wretched woman who was not worthy of his loyalty or his love, and at long, long last, John Thornton could find happiness, even if it meant she never would.
Holding his hand firmly over her heart, Margaret let the hot tears silently spill from her eyes and seep down her face. 'It is what I must do. It is what I want to do. There is nowhere else I want or need to be. Our John will be well again, just you wait and see.'